How to back up your Flickr photos before your free storage space is slashed

As we wrote yesterday, Flickr is introducing a number of changes to both its free and Pro packages. For users of the free tier, the most significant change is undoubtedly the slashing of free storage to just 1,000 photos and videos.

This is clearly a move designed to encourage people to upgrade to a paid-for account, complete with unlimited storage. But if you’re determined to stick with the free option, you’ll need to take action or risk losing huge numbers of photos in a few months’ time.

Dropping down from the previous 1 terabyte of free storage to just enough space for 1,000 images is a massive change — you were previously able to store hundreds of thousands of files for free — and Flickr is set to delete any photos and videos that put users over the new limit. The change is coming on February 5, and you’ll need to back up any photos you don’t want to lose.

There is also an important change coming in January. If you have more than 1,000 images uploaded, you will be prevented from uploading any more. When the following month rolls around, the excess will simply be deleted — starting with the oldest first.

As you may never have had to think about backing up your Flickr photos, you may well have no idea of how to do it. Here’s what you need to do.

Log into your Flickr account and head to You > Albums.
Hover your mouse over an album and click the down arrow that appears.
You’ll see a message letting you know that the photos in the album will be zipped up, and you’ll be emailed a link to the archive — you just need to click the Create Zip File button to continue.
When you receive the email, click the link to download your photos.

It is worth noting something from the Flickr support pages if you have large numbers of images stored in your albums:

If you are downloading albums, you can now download up to 5,000 photos in an album batch. If you want to download more than 5,000 items in a batch, you will need to create multiple albums.